My phone buzzes for the millionth time today. It’s my own fault for enabling so many notifications.

I peek at my screen, assuming it’s Secret telling me that yet another friend overshared some anonymous tidbit about their life. Instead, a little red icon pops up from an app I downloaded in the wee hours of the morning and forgot about: Facefeed.

The icon takes me to exactly what the app’s name suggests: A feed. Of faces. Facefeed is like Chatroulette with photos instead of video. To sign up for the app you take a picture of yourself, one that you can’t see after the fact.

The founder, Ben Cera, built it that way on purpose. “Without the selfies, at some point you’re actually communicating with someone instead of thinking about how you look,” Cera tells me.

Then your face appears in a mobile feed above and below other selfies. For strangers to message you they have to take a picture of themselves (that they also can’t view) and add text. It’s some of the goofier selfies you’ll ever see, since people can’t see or delete the shot after the fact. Faces get squished and weird neck wrinkles appear and shots are blurry or in the dark.

Yes, it’s just as creepy as it sounds.

In my personal messages, there’s a sweet looking Asian girl named Kina, who says hi. Then a man named AndrewCollins, eyebrows raised and chin resting on a bedspread. Then another man. And another. And another. Dude central up in here.

Their messages start to sound similar. One asks me “Why are you so frustrated?” Another says “Don’t be flustered baby girl.” A third and fourth make fun of my hair. I presume when I took my app selfie — at 5 am following an impromptu story interview — I’m tousled and grumpy. I wouldn’t know since I can’t see my own picture.

The founder of Facefeed, Ben Cera, is also the creator of my favorite picture messaging app: Context. But when I interview him about Facefeed, I don’t sugar coat my concern. “This creeps me out,” I say. “I shiver a little every time I get a new selfie from a stranger.”

Cera laughs and says, “I think it’s like a party.”

He doesn’t see Facefeed as an intrusive, strange way to pass one’s time. He sees it as a way to connect to others, without the bullshit veneer of social media. He tells me,

People act on Instagram and Facebook like they’re really cool and they only share really cool moments. But at the end of the day they’re home alone watching Netflix. In those moments it’s interesting to see engagement spike. Yesterday at 10 pm there were 4,000 messages sent an hour, and I don’t have that many users yet.

That’s probably what the founders of Chatroulette thought too. That they were opening up a new way of communicating and engaging in real human moments. But in the end the sentimental value was swapped out for dick vids.

Cera knows that Facefeed faces the same challenge. In fact, he’s so worried about the emergence of dick pics that he’s avoided marketing the app to any mainstream press.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]